The Downsides of Extreme Conscientiousness for Psychological Well‐being: The Role of Obsessive Compulsive Tendencies

Although conscientiousness exhibits positive relations with psychological well‐being, theoretical and empirical work suggests individuals can be too conscientious, resulting in obsessive‐compulsiveness, and therein less positive individual outcomes. However, the potential for curvilinearity between conscientiousness and well‐being has been underexplored. We measured 912 subjects on facets of conscientiousness, obsessive‐compulsive personality, and well‐being variables (life satisfaction, job satisfaction, self‐esteem, positive affect, negative affect, work stress). Methods of scoring included traditional sum‐scoring, traditional item response theory (IRT), and a relatively new IRT approach. Structural models were estimated to evaluate curvilinearity. Results confirmed the curvilinear relationship between conscientiousness and well‐being, and demonstrated that differential facet‐level relationships underlie weaker curvilinearity at the general trait level. Consistency was found in the strength of relation between conscientiousness facets with their obsessive‐compulsive variants and their contribution to decreased well‐being. The most common association was that higher standing on conscientiousness facets was positively related to negative affect. Findings support the idea that extreme standing on facets of conscientiousness more strongly linked to their obsessive‐compulsive variants contributed to lower well‐being, highlighting the importance of considering alternative functional representations of the relationship between personality and other constructs. Future work should seek to further clarify the link between conscientiousness and negative affect.     

Changing Views of Serpent Handling: A Quasi-Experimental Study

Knowledge about serpent handling sects (SHS) even among social scientists and legislators has been largely influenced by biased media reports. Our own field research suggests that factual knowledge about SHS is effective in changing stereotypes about serpent handling and in altering views as to the rights of believers to handle serpents in church. In a quasi-experimental study, participants were pretested with respect to both prejudicial and reasoned evaluative views about SHS. Participants saw either a video of contemporary SHS in which handlers demonstrated and explained their faith, or a control tape in which contemporary SHS were shown but serpent handling was neither demonstrated nor defended. As predicted, viewing the serpent handling video was effective in reducing stereotyping of SHS and in changing attitudes regarding the sincerity of the believers and the right of SHS to practice their faith without legal constraints. Appropriate controls indicated that changes were not simply a function of a pretest by treatment interaction. The relevance of these data for altering laws against the practice of serpent handling is discussed.     

Margins for Error: A Reply

I address Peter Mott's 'Margins for Error and the Sorites Paradox' ( The Philosophical Quarterly , 48 (1998), pp. 494–503). Mott criticizes my account of inexact knowledge, on which it satisfies margin for error principles of the form 'If one knows in a given case, one avoids false belief in sufficiently similar cases'. Mott's arguments are shown to be fallacious because they ignore the fact that our knowledge of inexact knowledge is itself inexact. In the examples discussed, the first-level inexact knowledge is perceptual. Since my defence of an epistemicist theory of vagueness explains our ignorance of truth-values in borderline cases as the result of knowledge the inexactness of which has a conceptual source, the paper also contributes to the defence of epistemicism about vagueness.     

Conditionals and Actuality

It is known that indicative and subjunctive conditionals interact differently with a rigidifying “actually” operator. The paper studies this difference in an abstract setting. It does not assume the framework of possible world semantics, characterizing “actually” instead by the type of logically valid formulas to which it gives rise. It is proved that in a language with such features all sentential contexts that are congruential (in the sense that they preserve logical equivalence) are extensional (in the sense that they preserve material equivalence). For a subjunctive conditional, the natural conclusion to draw is that it is non-congruential. It is much harder to defend the claim that an indicative conditional is non-congruential. The pressure to treat the indicative conditional as truth-functional is correspondingly greater. The implications of these results for attempts to interpret the indicative conditional as an epistemic or doxastic operator are assessed.

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Slower eating rate reduces the food intake of men, but not women: implications for behavioral weight control

This study tested a central tenet of behavioral weight control: does slower eating rate reduce food intake and positively affect appetite ratings. This study used direct behavioral observation of participants' (n=48; 25BMI35) eating behavior using Universal Eating Monitors. Food intake and ratings of "desire to eat" (collected each minute during meals) were represented as a function of time. Based on an acclimation meal, participants' eating rate was modified by instructing them to eat a bite of food when prompted by a computer, which generated three types of meals: (1) baseline (eating rate was the same as the acclimation meal), (2) reduced-rate (eating rate was reduced by 50%), and (3) combined-rate (eating rate at the beginning of the meal was identical to that of the acclimation meal, subsequently eating rate was reduced by 50%). All meals were ad libitum. Slower eating rate during the reduced-rate and combined-rate meals resulted in less food intake compared to the baseline meal for men, but not women. Ratings of desire to eat, normalized for the amount of food consumed, were lower during the combined-rate meal for men and women. Thus, this basic premise of behavioral weight control was supported for men, but not for women.     

Bidirectional Associations Between Newlyweds' Marital Satisfaction and Marital Problems over Time

Prevailing views of marital functioning generally adopt the view that marital problems predict decreases in marital satisfaction, but alternative theoretical perspectives raise the possibility that lowered satisfaction can also predict increases in problems. The current study sought to integrate and compare these perspectives by examining the bidirectional cross‐lagged associations between newlyweds' reports of their marital satisfaction and marital problems over the first 4 years of marriage. Using annual assessments from 483 heterosexual newlywed couples, we find evidence for problem‐to‐satisfaction linkages as well as satisfaction‐to‐problem linkages. Satisfaction was a stronger predictor of marital problems early in marriage but not as time passed; by Year 4 only problem‐to‐satisfaction linkages remained significant. These findings are consistent with the idea that couples with more problems go on to report lower levels of satisfaction and couples with lower levels of satisfaction go on to report more marital problems. This dynamic interplay between global judgments about relationship satisfaction and ongoing specific relationship difficulties highlights the value of examining bidirectional effects to better understand marital functioning over time.     

The impact of music on learning and consolidation of novel words

Music can be a powerful mnemonic device, as shown by a body of literature demonstrating that listening to text sung to a familiar melody results in better memory for the words compared to conditions where they are spoken. Furthermore, patients with a range of memory impairments appear to be able to form new declarative memories when they are encoded in the form of lyrics in a song, while unable to remember similar materials after hearing them in the spoken modality. Whether music facilitates the acquisition of completely new information, such as new vocabulary, remains unknown. Here we report three experiments in which adult participants learned novel words in the spoken or sung modality. While we found no benefit of musical presentation on free recall or recognition memory of novel words, novel words learned in the sung modality were more strongly integrated in the mental lexicon compared to words learned in the spoken modality. This advantage for the sung words was only present when the training melody was familiar. The impact of musical presentation on learning therefore appears to extend beyond episodic memory and can be reflected in the emergence and properties of new lexical representations.     

Prior experiences and perceived efficacy influence 3-year-olds' imitation

Children are selective and flexible imitators. They combine their own prior experiences and the perceived causal efficacy of the model to determine whether and what to imitate. In Experiment 1, children were randomly assigned to have either a difficult or an easy experience achieving a goal. They then saw an adult use novel means to achieve the goal. Children with a difficult prior experience were more likely to imitate the adult's precise means. Experiment 2 showed further selectivity--children preferentially imitated causally efficacious versus nonefficacious acts. In Experiment 3, even after an easy prior experience led children to think their own means would be effective, they still encoded the novel means performed by the model. When a subsequent manipulation rendered the children's means ineffective, children recalled and imitated the model's means. The research shows that children integrate information from their own prior interventions and their observations of others to guide their imitation.